Tombstone Arizona Territory -
1879.
Doc Holliday to Johnny Ringo; " "In vino veritas"
Translated,
"In wine there is truth." A common
enough Latin aphorism, meaning that alcohol consumption is like a truth serum.
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Southern California - same time frame -
"Howdy",
said the Marshall
to the stranger as he hitched his horse in front of the saloon. "Howdy",
replied the stranger. New around these parts? Yep, replied the stranger. What's
the name? Shorb. Where ya from? Shorb. Hmmph; Shorb from Shorb, eh? Yep. Never
heard of it.
Oh, you will. I own the San Gabriel Wine Company
and were' set to be big, real big. The Biggest! Wine and Brandy. Why, sir, you
won't be able to go into any saloon on the west coast and not see our brand on
the shelf. Well why didn't ya say so, said the Marshall. Let's have a drink!
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James De Barth
Shorb, a native of Maryland, came to California in 1863 looking for oil in Ventura County.
He was 18 years old at the time. Benjamin Wilson, owner of Lake Vineyard,
Pasadena, was tiring
of the business end of wine production when he suddenly inherited Shorb as his son-in-law,
who married his daughter Sue in 1867. Shorb was by that time 22 years old,
dynamic, enterprising and full of ambition. In 1870 Wilsons
only son, John, committed suicide, paving the way for Shorb to attain full
control of Wilsons
holdings.
At first, the wines
and brandies were marketed under the B. D. Wilson Co. label. By 1875 Shorb was
boasting that "we are the largest wine manufacturers on the Pacific Coast":
average production of the Lake
Vineyard was 150,000
gallons of wine annually, and 116,000 gallons of brandy.
Benjamin Wilson
died early in 1878, and though he had long before ceased to have any active
part in the wine firm bearing his name, his death seems to have been a signal
for it to go dormant for a time. The winery and vineyards remained, of course,
but the wine company withdrew from the public marketplace. Instead, Shorb sold
his production in bulk to the San
Francisco firm of Lachman & Jacobi for a couple of
years.
The second phase of
Shorb's winegrowing career, which saw the Lake Vineyard
transformed into something very different, opened in 1882 with the
formation of the San Gabriel Wine Company, capitalized at $500,000, and financed,
in large part, by English investors. The small settlement that was sited adjacent
to the vineyard on the hillside property was named Shorb. Grand plans for the
future loomed ahead. Prominent and moneyed Californians were also in on it. San
Gabriel Wine Company was launched on Shorb's land at the same time that the
town of Alhambra,
in which it stood, was being invented and promoted by Shorb. Stockholders had
shares in land as well as in the company, and dividends could be provided by
land sales if, by any unlikely chance, the wine trade should prove insufficient
to provide them.
Shorbs business and family grew by leaps and bounds. A fine new home was constructed at Shorb for the family, which now included nine children.
The San Gabriel Wine
Company itself owned 1,500 acres; 200 of these were planted to vines in 1883, a
further 400 in 1884—or that, at least, was what one prospectus stated. A
further 400 were planned for 1885. As for the winery itself, that was planned
on an unprecedented scale. The buildings, costing $125,000, were to provide a
winery meant to be, quite simply, "the largest in the world." The
fermenting capacity was a million gallons, the storage, a million and a
quarter.
Some
of the stockholders expressed doubts about beginning on so grand a scale, but
Shorb was confident and swept aside such timid hesitations. The winery,
brick-built and steam-powered, duly arose in the new town of Alhambra according to the original plan.
What can have
attracted this kind of interest in the provincial winegrowing industry of a
country that did not yet drink wine? The answer lies in the scourge of
phylloxera, which was then at the very highest pitch of its destruction of the
vineyards of Europe. It did not, at that time,
seem an alarmist notion, but rather the sober judgment of informed observers,
that Europe would soon be unable to supply its
own demand for wine. If wine was going to be produced, it would have to come
from unspoiled new sources—California
prominent among them.
However, the San Gabriel Wine
Company did not prosper. Much to the contrary~ Instead, it faced one business failure and financial
setback after another. From the outset the San Gabriel Wine Company. had never had quite enough money to operate
easily, for the capital stock was never fully subscribed, and in order to meet
its needs it had to depend more and more upon the sale of its lands. Shorb and
the San Gabriel Wine Company were in dire straits. By 1890 he was on the verge
of losing his entire investment and had only his wife's estate (itself heavily
mortgaged) between him and destitution. The possibility of selling the company
now became the main hope of its stockholders, but the chances of doing so
diminished as the company's troubles grew. In the next year, we hear of Shorb
busily planting citrus orchards on the company's land—an activity that angered
the powerful Isaias Hellman, whose bank held the mortgage on Shorb's own estate
and who was one of the company's stockholders. But
Shorb went out of business only on his death, which occurred just a few years
later, in 1896, at the rather early age of fifty-four; it is easy to imagine
that the scrambling required by his many enterprises, not least among
them the San Gabriel Wine Company, had worn him out.
The San Gabriel Wine Company struggled on until around the end of the century and then, at last, windows were shuttered and the doors slammed shut for the last time.
Note; WWB 4th edition states that the bottle dates ca. early 1900's. Bob missed it by a little on this one; but not by much. Best guess is mid 1890's. Regardless, the embossed bottles are flat rare, (the bulge neck being the rarest), and are at the top of many collectors small town must have list.
Credit; Much of the material was gleaned from an article by a Thos. Pinney dated 1989.
